Dupage Dietitians

A web application tailored for healthcare management

Tools: Miro | Figma

Project Brief

Our team of three UX designers collaborated with Dupage Dietitians, a team of dietitians that work closely with hundreds of patients in minority communities who are suffering from long-term health issues like diabetes, cancer, obesity, asthma, and more. Their goal is to work with patients to take control of their health. Dupage Dietitians tasked us to design a web application empowering dieticians to digitally manage their clients.

Timeline

January 23, 2024 - February 9, 2024

My Role

UX Research Lead

Research

Secondary Research

We delved into health and fitness statistics, discovering that 6 in 10 Americans have chronic diseases. Despite this, 60% trust dieticians, and 81% believe they understand nutrition basics. However, a staggering 93% underestimate macronutrient consumption.

To design for users of the modern age, we wanted to incorporate any potential Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make our web application as competitive as possible with current dietitian web applications available.

However, after conducting substantive secondary research regarding privacy and AI regarding healthcare, we found that we would be violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) if we moved forward with incorporating an AI chat feature.

Currently, OpenAI will not sign a business associate agreement with any HIPAA-related organization, therefore ChatGPT cannot be used for any electronic protected health information (ePHI).

Because of this conflict, we decided not to add in a ChatGPT or AI feature in our web application to protect patients from any potential privacy concerns or violations.

Resources:

Comparative/Competitive Analysis

We conducted a competitive analysis with similar platforms and competitors like Fitness Pal, Health Loft and Nourish. This allowed us to pinpoint the essential features of a food tracking site, an exercise tracking log and other dietitian web applications.

Please see the chart below.

Following the competitive analysis, we concluded that the Dupage Dieticians web application is currently lacking quite a few features compared to its competitors. Some of these elements include a client progress tracker, personalized notifications, workout guides, meal planning, interactive tools and community features.

User Interviews

User interviews are essential to the UX design process as we speak directly to users in order to discover their pain points.

In order to garner a substantive pool of participants helpful to our research process, we needed to create a screener survey to send out wide before narrowing down our official list of interview participants.

The screener survey helped us narrow in on participants we would like to include with the following criteria:

Must be health conscious
Must actively use platforms to support healthy living

Additionally, the screener survey helped us narrow in on participants we wanted to exclude with the following criteria:

Tech workers
Those who do not have underlying health conditions

Please see the below Health Screener Survey images for reference.

We received 61 responses from our screener survey and we solidified 14 interview candidates as a result from these responses.

We received 58 responses from our screener survey and we solidified 14 interview candidates as a result from these responses. From our personal connections we confirmed 4 interview candidates, resulting in a total of 18 interviews completed.

We interviewed a total of 8 healthcare professionals and 10 non-healthcare individuals all between the ages of 24 and 52. These interviews were conducted over Zoom or in person and they lasted about 20-30 minutes.

We created two separate lists of interview questions. One list was targeted towards non-healthcare professionals to gauge patients/clients frustrations and one list was targeted towards healthcare professionals to understand potential frustrations from the healthcare professional end.

Please see below for the interview questions geared towards non-healthcare professionals.

If you’re comfortable with it, could you please share a few demographic details about yourself? Specifically your age, location, economic background and any underlying health conditions? It’s ok to omit information about your health conditions if you’d prefer.
In what ways do you communicate with your healthcare provider regarding your healthcare/dietary needs? What did you like or not like about that communication style?
What type of appointment booking format do you like?
How do you currently track your daily calorie intake and exercise routines, if at all?
Have you used any tools such as meal planners or calorie trackers to keep track of your intake? If yes, how useful do you find these tools in managing your diet?
What do you like to see when tracking your calorie intake and exercise routine?
What worked well or didn’t work well for you when logging calorie intake and exercise routines?
Have you participated in health-related community forums before? If so, what do you find most valuable in such interactions?
What educational content would you like to see on a healthcare website?
If you could change one thing about the current health and nutrition apps you use, what would it be?
Is there anything else you’d like to share about using an app to enhance your experience in reaching your health goals?

Please see below for the interview questions geared towards healthcare professionals.

If you’re comfortable with it, could you please share a few demographic details about yourself? Age, location, your economic background and any underlying health conditions? It’s ok to omit information about your health conditions if you’d prefer.
In what ways do you communicate with your healthcare recipient regarding their healthcare/dietary needs? What did you like or not like about that communication style?
What type of appointment booking format do you like?
How do you typically prepare for an appointment with a client/patient? And please list out any digital resources you’d use if any.
If you were tasked with creating and sharing personalized meal plans, how would you like to create and share this in a web application?
What user interface tools did you find most helpful in a web application to get clients/patients the care they need?
Have you participated in health-related community forums before? If so, what do you find most valuable in such interactions?
What educational content would you like to see utilized on a healthcare website?
Is there anything else you’d like to share about using an app to enhance your experience in helping patients reach their health goals?

Research Synthesis

Following our interviews, we synthesized the key points including likes and dislikes from our interviewees with affinity mapping.

Please see the resulting affinity map below.

As you can see, the largest frustrations experienced by our interviewees include the following needs:

Personalization within the web application
Simplicity
An expansive food option list
Accessible education

Following our research synthesis, we've come to define our problem: Health-conscious patients seek a user-friendly, multilingual health app with personalized features, addressing dissatisfaction with complex fitness apps, sparse food options, limited education resources and privacy concerns for a more streamlined and efficient healthcare management experience.

User Persona

Using the information gathered from our user interviews, we identified trends and common pain points to create our persona “Gunther Smith.” By having a user persona to reference, we were able to make design decisions to make sure we were designing for our respective audience.

Please see below for the user persona.

Additionally, we focused on two user stories to prioritize which particular solutions we could ideate.

As a health-conscious user, I want access to a platform that guides me through the curated meal plans, so that I can ensure a diverse range of healthy food options for easy and enjoyable meal planning while promoting proper nutrition.
As a fitness-driven user. I want a simple calorie tracking feature that allows me to easily track my calorie intake, so that I can visually monitor my progress and stay accountable to my health objectives.

Ideation

Our team executed a Crazy 8 activity, fostering creativity. Focused on user-centric design, we aimed to streamline food logging, track exercises impacting caloric retention, and enhance communication with dietitians.

Solution Sketch

Our solution incorporated a curated weekly meal plan, flexible food logging options, a search bar with barcode scanning and speech-to-text features, and direct views of calories consumed and overall progress.

User Flows

As part of our ideation process supported by research results, we created the below user flows.

Usability Testing

In order to make sure we were designing with a user first mindset, we conducted usability tests with our wireframes.

We first conducted tests on our “Home Page” wireframe. We designed this wireframe to have services, reviews, healthy recipe recommendations, blog posts and information on medical nutrition therapy.

However, user testing resulted in feedback that the homepage was too cluttered and users suggested that some of the information would need to be broken out into separate pages. Such information included the blog post and in-depth information about nutritional therapy. We then iterated on our wireframe to incorporate this feedback as seen below.

Additionally, we conducted a usability test on the “Patient Portal Dashboard (My Weekly Plan).” The first iteration of this design included a carousel for users to scroll through their weekly meal plan and the wireframe also had three buttons under each image of their meal. These buttons allowed for the actions “see recipe,” “skip meal” and “log meal.”

Following usability test feedback, users found this interaction annoying and preferred to see all of their meals at once. Users also through the three call to action buttons were odd and not visually appealing.

As a result, we iterated on our design to accommodate this feedback and landed on the below changes.

Final Prototype

Following the usability testing and iterations, we present to you the below high-fidelity prototype.

As seen in the demonstration, we walk you through the below flows.

User Journey:

Gunther, our persona, logs into the web app, accessing his personalized dashboard. The prototype seamlessly allows him to view curated meals, log food through various options, and interact with dietitian-curated resources.

Appointment Scheduling and Communication:

Gunther can schedule appointments, send quick emails, and receive timely responses from his dietitian. The prototype ensures efficient communication and engagement.

Health Tracking and Resources:

The web app tracks calories consumed, provides exercise goals, and displays overall progress. Educational resources are easily accessible, fostering a holistic approach to healthcare management.

Accessibility and Security Features:

The prototype emphasizes accessibility with a time-off feature for privacy. Language options cater to diverse users, and a reminder feature keeps users informed about upcoming appointments.

Next Steps & Key Takeaways

Our next steps include integration with wearable devices, augmented reality features, additional testing, increased capabilities, and ensuring language options are inclusive.

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